Good church-going friends, are you familiar with how the lectionary works? The word lectionary comes from the same Latin root as the word “elect” and so has a meaning somehow related to “chosen.” There are chosen readings for each week of the church year, according to the season, and on a three-year cycle through three of the four Gospels.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke are what we call the synoptic Gospels—you might recognize a similarity to the word synopsis in there—which are the Gospels structured narratively around the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
There are similarities and differences between the three—Mark is the shortest and likely the first to be written, and skips right over Jesus’ birth and into his adult life; Matthew starts with a lengthy genealogy, situating Jesus with his ancestors; Luke has the most stories in common with Matthew, which causes some scholars to posit a hypothetical source document from which both Matthew and Luke are derived.
Each of the three has their own particular vibe, but they walk us through the story of Jesus. Each lectionary year—A, B, or C—is dedicated to one of these three books. We are in year A, which is Matthew. Next year is B, Mark, and then C, Luke, and then back to A.
As we go through the church year, Advent to Christmas to Epiphany to Lent to Holy Week to Easter to Pentecost and back around, we’ll hear from one of these three every Sunday morning, give or take, with a sprinkling of the fourth gospel, John, in there for good measure.
The Gospel According to John is the outlier. John doesn’t get its whole own year because it doesn’t have the same narrative function as the other three, and it has alternative, spiritual, enriching content. It does have some stories of Jesus’ life, that’s why it’s included in the four Gospels, but it’s different.
It is different in beautiful ways—its opening line: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the word was God.” I have that tattooed on my arm, which you may or may not have noticed when you’ve seen me in short sleeves.
The Gospel continues, a few verses later: “A light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” And later, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” And later, “I am the resurrection and the life; those who believe in me, even though they die, will live.”
The Gospel According to John is poetic and mystical, in addition to its narrative. The author writes, more than once, that it was written so that the reader might come to believe. It focuses very deeply on the end of Jesus’ life, and so is ever-present in our Lent and Holy Week lectionary.
But the Gospel According to John is also different in a way that has become more dangerous as time has passed. The Gospel According to John is the most antisemitic of the canon. Throughout its 21 chapters, it makes dozens of references to “the Jews” as a group, and as those responsible for violence and especially for the violent death of Jesus.
The distinction between “the Jews” and “the religious authorities” or “the state” may have been clear to the original audience, but its interpretation throughout Christian history has not made that plain. These words have been used to harm our Jewish siblings for centuries, and to bias us against them, even implicitly. This must not continue.
The history and present of Christian hegemony in this nation and around the world means we have to overcorrect at all available opportunities. This goes especially for the ways in which Christian history—and our present—are intertwined with white supremacy.
Those of us who benefit most directly from white supremacy may find this the hardest to reconcile. It is easier for us to think that these ideas lived and died with Hitler, and that our Jewish siblings are safe the world over. But last week, various hate groups announced their intentions to harm US Jews on shabbat, their holy day of community and rest, calling it a Day of Hate. Many non-Jewish allies stepped up to provide a peaceful presence outside local houses of prayer. This scare tactic was sufficient enough to scare many people away from their synagogues on Friday, but fortunately there were no major incidents. In the year of our Lord 2023, these are still the realities faced by our Jewish siblings.
This week’s text from the Gospel According to John is not one such text that includes the harmful use of the generalization “the Jews” but it does mention them and it does feature another much-maligned group of Jewish people, the Pharisees. The Pharisees were a group of Jewish religious leaders, some of whom—like Nicodemus—were members of the Sanhedrin, a deliberative body of judges.
They knew the Jewish Law forward and backward, and could help their communities stay in line with the will of God by adhering to its precepts. They were faithful interpreters of sacred texts.
Like any rule enforcers, they weren’t hugely popular. They were respected by their communities, for sure, but most of them were probably not the life of any parties. There is some contemporary Jewish research that posits that Jesus himself was a Pharisee, which would explain why he has so much contact with them, and why they take his dissent so seriously.
However, Christian history has taken this title and turned into a slur for being legalistic and shrewd—and Jewish. Lutherans must reckon with this history most carefully.
Later in his life, Martin Luther’s work veered into hateful antisemitism. His interpretation of the Gospel According to John blamed Jews the world over for the death of Jesus, and attempted to hold contemporary Jews accountable for this crime. He wrote a 60,000-word treatise in which he spewed venomous words against all Jewish people, and called for their deaths. This is wrong, and cannot be tolerated. Lutheran history includes Lutheran antisemitism, which did nothing to stop Adolf Hitler’s antisemitism. We have to tell the truth about this, because, like Jesus says in John’s complicated Gospel, the truth will make us free.
You have not spent enough Lenten seasons with me to know that this sermon would be at least half introduction and disclaimers—so typical of me. Okay! So! On to the main event, the actual words of the text!
The gospel reading for today is a pretty famous exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus, the aforementioned Pharisee. He comes to see Jesus under cover of night, asking his burning questions. I love Nicodemus for this.
I can just imagine that he has been lying awake at night for days. He has heard that this man, Jesus, is called the Son of God; he has heard him declare forgiveness of sins; he has heard him proclaim freedom from the systems that oppress. Nicodemus has probably tossed and turned, wondering how this could be. And so, one of those nights, he gets up out of bed, puts on his shoes, and goes to see Jesus.
Nicodemus treads carefully, saying, basically, ‘your reputation precedes you’ and that the only explanation for Jesus’ behaviors and actions is that he is telling the truth about himself, that he was, in fact, sent by God. Jesus does not deny this, and cryptically claims that “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
I imagine Nicodemus’ eyes went wide, eyebrows raised, then immediately furrowed in confusion. Being born a second time is not physically possible. What could Jesus mean by this? Is Nicodemus suddenly wondering if he has made a huge mistake, and this miraculous man is actually...bonkers?
How many times have you heard the Gospel read from up here, heard a preacher say “this is the Gospel of the Lord,” and thought, “what on earth did she just read?” Was this week one of those times? Jesus says some wild stuff. For example: “What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit...The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Oh, well, it all makes sense when you put it that way…
What Jesus’ poetry about water and spirit are pointing toward is a fundamental shift in understanding. It is no wonder that Nicodemus does not understand, and it is no wonder if you don’t understand, exactly, either. Jesus is insisting that the standard operating procedures are going by the wayside, and that devotion to God requires a complete redirect. Worship of our earthly ways of knowing and being must come to an end.
The earthly circumstances of our birth—our health, our social class, our race, our gender, our nationality—are not what defines us. Our connection to God, our status as God’s beloved children, is what defines us.
“We speak of what we know and we testify to what we have seen—yet you don’t receive our testimony,” Jesus says to Nicodemus.
As Jesus and the disciples have been out and about in the world, telling the truth about God to everyone they meet, healing them of their wounds and freeing them from sin, the governing authorities have tried to quash this movement. Concerned about what the liberated masses might mean for their power, the leadership discredits Jesus and threatens him. These leaders are so busy trying to shut down the message, they haven’t listened to it properly. If they had, as perhaps Nicodemus has begun to do, they would know that this gospel truth is for them, too.
These great legal scholars have dedicated their lives to the word of God, and to its rightful administration. Like many of us, they may struggle to see that the abundant life proclaimed in its pages is not just for some ideal person, but for every person.
In the world we live in, the idea of “free” is hard to grasp. Everything has a price. Everything has a catch. There’s always something in the fine print.
Did you catch the famous John 3:16 in our Gospel reading? “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” Everyone.
You’ve seen John 3:16 on a neon poster board in the stands of a professional sports game. You’ve seen it emblazoned on a keychain, scribbled on a post-it, stitched on a pillow.
To bring Martin Luther back from exile, he referred to this sentence as “the Gospel in miniature” and it has been a useful summary for many Christians throughout history. “...like any summary of the Gospel, this famous sentence pushes us to clarify how we understand God’s love and God’s justice to be related. If we distort this key relationship, we can render the verse not the [good news], but [its antithesis], a proclamation not of love and invitation but of contempt and exclusion.” [1]
Since this sentence has been spread so thoroughly in our culture, it is easy to imagine that it has been arranged and interpreted to emphasize just about any of its key words, but most likely the word “believe”. Did God love the world such that only those who “believe” have eternal life? By what metric is that belief measured? This can make any of us quite nervous about our own salvation, unsure if we’re believing the right thing in the right way in order to qualify.
It is important that we do not get too hung up, beloveds, on any single sentence in our scripture. Yes, John 3:16 is a fine summary, but only a summary.
We do well to remember that God loves graciously, mercifully, faithfully, extravagantly, uncomprehendingly. God loves the whole world, the entirety of creation, each individual creature, enough to freely give us the gift of grace. The mechanics and logistics of salvation are “God’s business, not ours. What we are charged to do is to proclaim again and again the good news of God’s extravagant love and mercy for the world, without exception.” [1]
Grace abounds, dear ones. For you, and for me, and for Nicodemus, and for Martin Luther, and for everyone. Thanks be to God!